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Example. A young pre-teen girl went missing in my home town earlier this week. The police were able to locate her in about 24 hours because they got cooperation from Facebook and Verizon. They didn't have any problems getting the proper authorization from a judge in literally a matter of minutes. There really isn't anything wrong with the current system. It works fine and it leaves a paper trail so we can all look back and make sure everything is above board.

Pretty much all of these tech companies build their infrastructure in such a way that they could easily assist law enforcement in an emergency. That just makes sense. Allowing cops or government agents to just willynilly snoop around looking at others people private information without cause doesn't. It's an affront to the dignity of the individual in a so called free society.

You know what I don't get? Why would they need this? To randomly snoop on everyday people? I bet deep down somewhere in between NSA and FBI is one person with an intense amount of power that is also a perverted freak and likes to snoop around in high schoolers FB pages. Also if you are snooping here powerful man in the background: You are supposed to act in the best interest of your citizens

The law enforcement and prosecution world works by first getting
a warrant (using reasonable cause) and only then starting to wiretap some method of communication. But often this doesn't help because, for example, you can't wiretap a dead guy's phone, advanced criminals learn how to not plan crimes on the phone, etc.

The national security apparatus works differently: the NSA has tapes of all phone lines (and IP traffic, etc). This is illegal, so it can't be used to prosecute anyone (including terrorists, child traffickers or drug dealers), and if an FBI agent or federal prosecutor found out anything about a suspect from such an illegal wiretap they would be off the case and because of "fruit of the poisonous tree" the bad guy could walk, etc. But you can use information from this source to put people in gitmo or to sign off on firing a missile from a drone. Which is exactly what this is used for. Also for spying.

Anyway, the FBI know that this exists and they dream of this scenario: they find a dead body. They go to a judge and ask for a warrant on the dead guy's phone conversations. Retroactively. Magically, a tape with all his phone conversations appears. They find out who killed him. They say it's no different from getting his phone log (just the numbers and duration of phone calls) or bank statements or the inbox from his email account, all of which they can get legally today.

Because people moved from phones to facebook chat and google hangouts, the agencies need to force the service providers to enable wiretapping those methods of communication as well. But the interface they want is not "starting from today, give me a daily tape of all phone conversations to or from this number" but "we copy all traffic at the switch and store everything, different agencies get access to this according to current law and level of emergency".

I'm just thinking about the amount of information that would need to be captured for such a system to exist....Skype would be so screwed. How much audio/video data would need to be stored? Or how about Chatroulette, a site that I don't think technically even receives either webcam data stream, how would they store so much data?

The way this was solved decades ago was a filter that recognized keywords and saved the recording from being overwritten and queued it to be analyzed by a human being. Recordings that were not flagged were overwritten with new information. Phone numbers that turned out to be interesting (as determined by a human) automatically turned all phone numbers they called or that called them into "interesting".

Better technology allows you to compress audio using a codec developed for speech and store it on a medium that has the best GB/dollar. I don't know what they do about video. Maybe, for a time, terrorists could avoid the NSA by communicating in sign language over video chat.

P2P is funneled into NSA at the ISP, as we now know.

We know that commercial communication companies that provide "secure" channels share their private keys with the government (skype, blackberry).

I assume secure comm devices that don't play ball are compromised by other means. Really well implemented crypto is compromised at the endpoints, because they are weaker than the channel (i.e. trojan on your computer sees your encrypted drive and email when it's decrypted by you).

This sounds like an interesting and great idea... except for the part where this (seriously cool) project is being run by the same derailed government that thinks GITMO, The Iraq War, The War on Drugs, the TSA frisking kids, CISPA, and fricking bailing out Wall Street are in our best interests, too.

Pretty much everything mentioned was first labeled a paranoid conspiracy theory. Then it came out that it really was happening. There area few points mentioned that I'm not very familiar with, but the overall message seems consistent.

Yea, but why? Ok, they spy on us. Then what? Everyone's paranoid but I don't see much speculation about the end goal. Are we headed towards dictatorship? Something worse? Are we to become slaves for the mega-corporations?

They feel they need this especially now, because there's a global rising of public feeling against the Elites - the bankers, the corporations... the 1% who own and run (ruin) everything via their imposed system of fiat, debt-based monetary scams. The net effect of which is to gradually but inevitably transfer real wealth from the people to the bankers.

The Elites are desperately trying to stay in control. They are going to lose, but in the struggle they are going to make things very unpleasant for the little people.

What I took from the article is that they're still going to get warrants, they just want streamlined access to whatever they have warrants for. If they're going watch all of your email/etc without a warrant, they'll do it at the NOC.

I work in public safety technology and communications systems with about 10 years experience. I can tell you first hand that most of the folks in law enforcement are dangerously under qualified and much too unprofessional to have this kind of power. Judges aren't much better, but I think the whole act of making something public record and going before someone in a different organization is completely essential to keep things honest. It isn't the back door thing that bothers me. All these companies already have back doors that allow them to analyze the data that flows through their systems. I just think it is a slippery slope. As soon as the back door is required and law enforcement is allowed to access as they wish...a cascade of fuck ups and violations of privacy are going to happen.

And so the way it's done, is that each NATO country has 'diplomatic missions' from one or more other NATO countries at their Echelon analysis sites. These are just rooms, where for instance in the USA some British intercept officers would be in a room that was 'British territory'. They review the intercepts that are thrown up by the computers as of possible interest. Any that actually are interesting, they pass to their American colleagues.

This is legal, because the USA side didn't 'spy on their own citizens', they just got handed some intelligence material by a friendly State.

This is something that needs talked about. It is one thing to have a service that the developers can access from their servers sitting right in front of them. As soon as they make that same service available over the network to someone else, like law enforcement for example, than it accessed by others almost as easily.

For some prospective, I work in public safety communications and technology systems and I deal with this shit every day. The police officer that broke the case I used as an example is a fucking great cop. He knew right away that if there was a 12 year old girl missing, better call Facebook and figure out who her cell carrier is because the information they have about her will probably break the case faster than anything else. It all worked out and she is safe at home with her family. He is the exception that proves the rule though. 90% of the other cops I deal with on a regular basis are complete idiots and douche bags that would take every advantage of the opportunity to snoop on people and inject themselves in petty bullshit...while cops like old boy that saved the little girl the other day are busy out saving little girls and catching actual bad people. the rest of them will just abuse it to no end.

Every itself respecting social site has had these backdoors forever. They are basically portals that allow government officials with legal clearance to see the accounts they requested.

Once you reach a certain size, it's much more economical to do it like that, otherwise you need to use one of your ops engineers to pull the account and then export and provide it to the government official.

I agree with everything you have said. I think the system they are proposing will be ripe with abuse. Example: FBI agent suspects wife of cheating. Uses backdoor to check her facebook page, gmail account, etc. I realize this may be an extreme scenario but in the case of privacy I personally believe that even extreme scenarios should be considered.

These backdoors already exist -- back when the China-Hacked-Into-Gmail scandal happened, the hackers reportedly gained access through the backdoor that google had to create for the US Government to use.

Wouldn't building back doors into such services be inherently unsafe, because such a feature could be misused by others simply because the access points are there and just need to be tricked. A telephone system is less unsafe, because of the way it is used. There aren't billions of internet access points that plug into its control infrastructure.

The don't to spy on everyone to help them catch criminals, they want to spy on everyone to control your behavior. If you think the government is always spying on you, you will police your own behavior. Its Bentham's panopticon.

Yeah, I live in the UK, does this backdoor shit mean the US wants to look at my communications too? They can go suck my dick mate, it's just like China having their own version of popular web services so they can monitor everything on them.

If this kind of thing keeps happening I expect web services based outside of the US will only become more popular. They're only hurting themselves at the end of the day.

Really? I think The Onion does an awesome job making fun of the real world by being sarcastic or exaggerating. If anything, the sad part is that they're not actually exaggerating too much in this case.. :P

Yep, and these backdoors were actually exploited by the Chinese to hack google servers and steal data from US officials and Chinese dissidents a few years back. Even if you ignore the multitude of privacy concerns it doesn't even make sense from a basic security standpoint.

We, our personalities, are nothing more than a comparative association system of our memories. We are the predictive accumulation of our memories and experience. With enough collected data of a person, one could predict their actions in a specified situation and predict most probably events that could influence a person to do almost anything one wanted.

The scenario

If you encourage movie industry to push hero cop movies against terrorists for 10-15 years, when the most receptive aged generation indoctrinated with those memories gets to an active voting age, they will be highly vulnerable to manipulative fear tactics involving the threat of terrorists.

You have to be really naive to think that we're not being watched online already, in some way or another. And I'm not talking about the FBI alone. Facebook itself gathers their user's information and sells them to major companies. That's not new.

It will make us build better encryption, move more people to Tor nodes, https will completely replace http, data will be encrypted on hard drives and more privacy tools will become the norm. We will become more aware of how much information is being sent in the clear now and fix the problem, when we know that government IS spying on us.

On the whole redditors aren't terribly bright. That's why they get so shocked any time a government tries to bring in more censorship, and act as if laws and 'rights' actually mean anything. We also talk about things like this in public on reddit and presumably use Google frequently.

Personally, as it's relatively easy to intercept anything on TOR, and anything stronger will just be suspicious anyway; I decided I'll just live with the knowledge everything is monitored - if they care enough to start bothering me we've gotten to the level of punishing thoughtcrime, as I'm harmless.

And lets be honest here, if it's that bad already there's fuck all I can do about it.

Edit: Personally, I prefer it when they're this transparent about it. We all know this is just legitimising things that are already in place.

I don't see how this is anything but a good thing. These are the same people that killed Osama bin Laden, we should trust them. It would be foolish to think that they have anything but our own safety in mind. Only people who have something to hide would worry about this stuff anyways. So I'm going to keep using Facebook and Microsoft products without worrying about it. Brb, gotta check in on FourSquare!

How about explaining this to me: if companies like Google and such allow this "back door" access, can't everyone concerned with their internet safety just use a different search engine? The internet doesn't simply exist on the four or five main sites people use--would it be that hard to just use another one?

Don't get me wrong, I think that what they're doing is a violation of privacy. I also believe that the burden of moving your online presence from an established facebook profile to another social media site, or using a less effective search engine is an unfair result of that breach.

I just want to know if there's a possibility to just move "on to the next one."

Savvy users would probably do so, but the average user isn't technical enough and just doesn't care. Especially considering the money and sheer inertia of the Big Few (everyone else is using them, so not using them is like cutting off an arm).

Moving to another service also wouldn't prevent the government from obtaining all of the information about the things you've already done on those Big Few, either.

In my humble opinion, this is why it's best to have a limited government with so little power it wouldn't even be able to think of doing these things, rather than a large, powerful one (despite the advantages the larger one might bring). The capacity for abuse is just too great.

I'm beginning to think we (as in, reddit and other communities) should start treating internet security like we do public health issues. There's really not any organized matter to the savvy users who know the more effective methods of covering tracks. Expert-level groups should convene to decide effective intervention strategies to encourage netizens to adopt healthier 'net habits one thing at a time, and maybe then it wouldn't just be the savvy users picking up the better technical habits. As it is, many people just learn one or two things at a time by happenstance (if any at all).

I don't mean something like an all-comprehensive technical manual, either. Rather a more distilled "Here's this option, here are the benefits and here is how you do it" (focusing on one key skill) that you see with, say, community-level interventions on condom use or something.

I didn't know that part of this access would lead to past use of the websites. That is really unnerving.

I'm absolutely with you as far as politics go. I believe that people in public service have the best intentions, but when someone's at the helm of something with the sweeping powers that we've been seeing the ugly side of recently, it speaks volumes for the argument for limited government.

One of the things I remember from the computer security class I took back in college is that you don't put backdoors into systems.
If you put a backdoor in the system for one person to use, somebody else will figure out how to exploit it.

I really get frightened when I hear them talking about shit like 'going dark'. It makes me think of a bunch of fuckwits all sitting around in dark glasses and suits who believe that life is some kind of Mission Impossible and they're all Tom Cruise.